Whisper
by Feather Ice
Summary: Reality separated the wayward Timelord and his chosen companion, but when they continue to call to each other, does anything at all make it through from one world to another?


Points of Interest: This is a lot longer than it looks at first, but I think it's some of my best writing. It's very much a drabble. The first half is a little better than the second, I think.

Whisper

_If you look up, then she'll be there._

He whispers the thought in the back of his mind, a sort of echo to the clockwork. He can hear it in every oxygenating breath, in every gush of blood, in every breath back out. The cogs turn making the same old noises, but now there's a chime buried somewhere, he thinks, in the beating of his heart. It means he is breaking down, that he is getting old and starting to crumble. He fears it, but he cannot remove either heart, even if he could correctly guess which one was stricken. The sound is poison to him; he loves it as much as he hates it. It's ingrained in all of his mechanisms and he is quickly losing any remaining chance to escape the sound.

_If you look up, then she'll be there._

He doesn't look up of course, but keeps his eyes down. He has work to be done, work that needs his attention here and now—there's no time to indulge the thought. Once he finishes he has more work to be done and after that there is either still more work or his stubbornness to contend with. To look would be an admission that his heart aches. To look would be proof of his foolishness, of the way he made himself unclean, of history's irrelevance; to look would show how little he has learned since his journeys began. The reasons are good and make sense, but they only scratch the surface of the wall erected between himself and that promise.

_If you look up, then she'll be there._

He is as afraid of the whisper itself as he is of what it means. Forever the coward, valiant hero of the Last Great Time War. He disgusts himself when he stops and thinks—really thinks—which is one reason among many never to do so. But when he's alone and there is no companion to interest himself with, then the thoughts come whether he wants them or not. The truth is, he was lonely then and lonelier now. It's not as though he doesn't know what he wants, a fact which both eases and solidifies his yearning, because it's the substance behind the whisper's persistence. He doesn't want another companion or another adventure and the truth is that he would trade everything in his power to freely give for her return. Only she can fix what has gone wrong, only she can heal the rift she left behind her. From that his fear springs forth; what if he does turn and she's** simply not there?**

_If you look up, then she'll be there._

The whisper echoes and he shudders, trying to ward it away, but he's either too clever or not clever enough (it's funny how often the two of those seem to coincide) to push it away. It drags on his eyeballs like an ocean, so terribly patient. There is no need for it to drive him insane at once; the whisper has a long, long eternity to torment him, a lot of heartbeats to go. It takes its time, making him see her out of the corner of his eye, see the flash of her hair or the familiar slouch of her back against the TARDIS console. At those times he walks away. He thinks he can hear her laughing or greeting him sometimes, and so puts on some music, turning it as loud as necessary. He can deal with hallucinations and products of his extremely overactive imagination. It's the dreams that tear him into pieces.

_If you look up, then she'll be there._

The whisper of her invades his dreams as often as he closes his eyes. He has never needed too much sleep, but he avoids it now, dodging every unnecessary opportunity for rest. He ought to be thankful that her face has replaced far worse, tragic dreams, but his heart feels no lighter than when he would wake with the scenes of war burned into his eyes. He sees her in his dreams, and speaks to her and touches her. Sometimes it even seems that everything since their separation was just an illusion and that they're still travelling the stars. Other dreams take him to the day he lost her and play the scene out like a broken record, or separate them in any one of a thousand ways. Sometimes the dreams aren't even logical; there's no reason for her to be there, but she hangs over his shoulder like a silent ghost. He cannot escape her presence in the dreams, and when he wakes she is torn from him again, if not so deeply as the first time, certainly not any more pleasantly.

And worse, sometimes he forgets.

He forgets that he needs to look up in the first place.

To this man, nothing should have changed. No meeting can last forever, particularly not in his world. He has lost by greater odds previously, when he was young and spoiled and believed that such a calamity could not touch him. He has lost children and grandparents and lovers and friends in too many ways to count, ways that would drive others into running much faster and further than he ever managed to do. Her loss, the loss of a single girl should not hurt him, in fact, he should be desensitized enough not even to bear pain for it. In truth he's learned nothing from his loss, nothing from having all that he gave his foolish hearts to ripped from his hands. He gave his heart to her, placed himself in her hands, and now that she too has broken his trust, he weeps in silence.

His broken heart beats and her whisper is in his ears.

_If you look up, then she'll be there._

He looks up.

The girl takes to the stars more than ever now that she cannot touch them. Every weekend sees her taking a trip out of the city and into a place where the stars shine at least a little brighter. She watches them then, not really for anything in particular. The stars are lovely aren't they? It's peaceful, isn't it? Viewing them from some patch of earth somewhere is a much better alternative to traipsing about through them. They look like beautiful little jewels from far away, but up close she knows better. Stars are volatile infernos constantly collapsing and exploding like deranged flowers. If you get close at all, you'll be caught in the blast, you'll be burned alive before you have the chance to so much as protest.

He was like that.

It was a million times better than just looking from a hunk of rock somewhere.

She watches the stars for something and won't say what.

The girl thinks of him all the time, and really, it's embarrassing. There has never been a boy who she was truly obsessed with. She forgets him whenever she's too busy to mope, but he always finds a way back into her thoughts. She thinks far too often of their adventures and the games they played and how it felt to be in the middle of those volatile infernos, flying. She thinks of how he would speak and of that laugh of his, surprisingly rare. She thinks of his quicksilver grins and his eyes and his hair and the way he moved. She thinks of everything she can remember, folding and unfolding it in her mind like paper to try and seal him into her mind. She will never forget him, and yet, things have already begun to slip away. Just little things, tiny details. Just…

Everything…

She watches the stars as though they will draw his picture for her and wishes that she'd kept at least one photo on her as though she had some common sense.

Then the weekend is over and she goes home again, slipping into normal life. And it is so normal, so mundane. He had once accused humans of doing nothing but eating chips, drinking tea, and watching the telly. She does plenty of that herself now. She has a new job, because her first one fell through like a brick on tissue paper. She gets up, she goes to work, and she comes home. She watches the telly when she's back, and has become horribly addicted to sad movies. Anything that leaves her crying and with an ache in her chest; she loves them. Her mother says this is because she wants to feel sorrier for someone other than herself. She's not sure if she buys this because although the movies are sad, she hasn't found anything that compares to the ending she had forced on her.

But she looks for the tears drifting down a girl's cheeks and listens for the pain in their voices and tests at the pain in her heart, looking for something.

Always looking and never finding; never knowing.

And she looks to the stars every night before bed.

She goes through jobs like takeout, except she's never quite satisfied with the results. Her mother asks her with almost frightening precision on her jobs every time she visits, and although the girl mumbles things like "fine" and "nothing", she gets the sneaking suspicion that her mother is not fooled. Her stepfather is constantly offering her a job or an allowance; constantly trying to help. Trying to be fatherly, she supposes. In another world, in another time, she would have jumped at the chance to be with him, but here he is her mother's and she cannot truly butt in. She bides her time and feels lonelier than she will say, but there's always him to think about, and when she thinks of him so much she thinks her heart might burst, there's always jobs to look for.

She's despairing a bit as to the workforce. Nothing is quite right, quite what she's looking for. She's clever about it, and can actually go for a job she wants with her stepfather's connections (and something about grief tends to overrule guilt as to exploiting this), but nothing is the way it should be. She can't focus the way she should, doesn't find new things to explore the way she ought to, can't feel her heart sing like…

Well, like it does when she looks to the stars.

Her heart sings when she thinks of him too. A lighter tune sees her laughing out of nowhere, much to the confusion of anyone nearby; a sadder tune brings forth an aching feeling that she cannot stand but refuses to go without. Usually the two are so close they're interchangeable. She knows it is wrong and that the tune should be different, should be longer and louder and just _more_, but she cannot find it. A glimpse of a suit in a shop window and she almost thinks she remembers, but then it's gone. A story of aliens in the tabloids and she catches the first strains of the melody before it fades away. She scours the world with her eyes and her ears and every part of her that she can give, just searching.

And she finds nothing.

And when she looks to the stars everything feels so right.

So why does she always cry?

She thinks back and back and back, always in the past. She thinks of when and how she had her heart gouged out, and she can recall the exact feeling. She thinks back further to how things had been before and she can recall something of it, but not enough to satisfy her. She remembers being warned once, and laughs a bit when she realizes how she can never call that person now. She remembers being warned lots of times, in various ways, of what she already knew.

Get too close and you'll be burned alive.

But still she ignored them and she got close, and yes, it burned. She was burned to ash, burned to nothing. Burned to death. Once, she can recall him telling her that time was in flux, always a chaotic mish-mash of changes. She'd found him to be correct, like always, and now, she supposed, she was experiencing it firsthand. She was dead, and now only the past existed. Death was just being frozen in that flux of time, reliving the same moments over and over until you just slipped away. But if she could remember exactly what it was like, become her old self, her worthwhile self, just for a second—

Then maybe all her searching will lead her to a voice again.

Except this time—

Ever hopeful, the girl's eyes rise to the stars.

But as he looks up, there is only emptiness and as she looks up, there is no one in the stars.

Their eyes fall, and he hears her voice again.

_Just a fluke,_ she promises, closing his eyes. _Just an accident. Chin up, hey? You can't slow down now. There's so much running to do! Because, you know…_

Their eyes fall, and she hears his voice again.

_Rose Tyler, I—_ he is saying, intense as ever, and then stops. _Ah. That can wait. Since I suppose this isn't my last chance to say it…_

And they whisper back, so quiet that no one else can hear, and they do not know that what they are hearing is more than an echo.


End file.
